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Ever since the Jaron Lanier interview the other day, I can't get this idea of tech destroying jobs out of my head. The comparison between the relative value an

Ever since the Jaron Lanier interview the other day, I can't get this idea of tech destroying jobs out of my head. The comparison between the relative value and number of employees between Kodak and Instagram was a stark (if cherry-picked) example of how the new tech economy concentrates wealth to an almost monarchic extreme. Now obviously efficiency should on balance be good—automation should free people for higher pursuits—but when you look at the objective reality of what the democratization of distribution has really done for people, you see that despite being free from greedy middle-men sucking up all the value, it's tremendously difficult to actually make a living from the easy distribution we enjoy in the YouTube era. Technologists can still become millionaires relatively easily, but only by aggregating the effort of literally millions. The most elite social media celebrities are earning low six figures and there aren't very many of them. I still believe in the idea that value is not necessarily always reflected in cash money, and that a lot of the automation that computers produce can help everyone, but as the privileged few I think we owe it the world to give some consideration to destitute and unemployable. Moving towards in the direction of socialist policy where a minimum standard of living is guaranteed is probably the right thing to do if automation is driving the economy, but at the same time I don't think it's a panacea, because people want to work and feel useful, and even if the minimum standard of living is acceptable, the poor will still be resentful if their is an intellectual thought-worker class above them. All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago
Markets discover correct prices. Technology drives up the value of some humans and drives down the value of others. We are already seeing entities fight to prevent the market from discovering the correct price for many sorts of labor. Expect this to increase. The resources being expended on this doomed to fail enterprise should instead be focused on turning the sorts of people whose value gets driven down by tech into the sorts of people whose value gets driven up by tech. In other words: it is the industrial revolution and the price of crops is dropping rapidly. Do you institute price controls or figure out how to retrain farmers? It is worth noting that we STILL have price controls on crops left over from the last paradigm shift. I'm not optimistic about our ability to meet this one.
- Steko 13y ago
  The problem has nothing to do with preventing the market from pricing labor correctly. The problem is that the very nature of web services and scale creates huge lottery winners. The Instagram founders weren't 1,000 times better than other programmers. The market didn't price their labor there. They were at the right place at the right time and were a tiny bit better or more connected or whatever than their competitors. And because of that they effectively won a huge lottery. Everyone else was lucky if they got rent money.
  - BrianEatWorld 13y ago
    The market did though. Ignore the raw values and consider the amounts taken into consideration by the economic actors, expected returns, which have a probability component. As the chance of payoff for startups is low, a high payoff may actually be required to accurately price the market to draw the requisite amount of labor.
    - clicks 13y ago
      Isn't that then a really good argument that relying on markets is decidedly not the way to go, and that socialism, for example, is more fair and just than capitalism? In the end, we all want a society that's "fair" to the largest amount of people, where each person gets about as much as they toil for. It seems the market is apparently doing a pretty lousy job, if we've come to a reality where two lucky dudes who were well connected could sell their photo-sharing app for a billion all the while a good half of the country risks getting financially decimated come an unforeseen disease or bad accident somewhere.
    - Steko 13y ago
      "Ignore the raw values" You can't ignore the raw values and just look at means, aggregates and weighted probability functions when the problem we're talking about is inequality. "chance of payoff for startups is low ..." What you're describing is entrepreneurial risk, not the price of labor.
      - 13y ago
chasb 13y ago
> All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career. Come work in healthcare.
akgerber 13y ago
Of course, the Instagram vs. Kodak comparison leaves out the actual network-connected cameras built into smartphones that Instagram leverages. Untold thousands of people are employed designing smartphone chips and the phones themselves, building smartphone operating systems and app platforms, manufacturing the smartphones, selling the phones and service, and maintaining the cellular network not to mention the rest of the internet, many also at middle class wages though not all in the US. Of course, in the heyday of film, many cameras were made in Japan or elsewhere. The few Instagram employees are just a small part of the puzzle that allows Instagram to be a successful company.
steveklabnik 13y ago
> I can't get this idea of tech destroying jobs out of my head. You may enjoy reading "Capital, vol 1"[1] by Karl Marx, specifically, chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry. Sections five and six discuss this in great detail. 1: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
YokoZar 13y ago
> All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career. It's entirely possible to create technology that works the other way, such as inventing the power-loom that replaced expensive hand-weavers with larger numbers of cheap migrant laborers, spawning the Luddite movement to smash the machines to protect "good jobs". There are surely lots of modern equivalents that replace the expensive few with larger numbers of cheap workers, simultaneously creating value and spreading wealth out. It could be something like software usability, or a process that lets locals produce something easily that they used to have to go to a central supplier for.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

Markets discover correct prices. Technology drives up the value of some humans and drives down the value of others. We are already seeing entities fight to prevent the market from discovering the correct price for many sorts of labor. Expect this to increase. The resources being expended on this doomed to fail enterprise should instead be focused on turning the sorts of people whose value gets driven down by tech into the sorts of people whose value gets driven up by tech. In other words: it is the industrial revolution and the price of crops is dropping rapidly. Do you institute price controls or figure out how to retrain farmers? It is worth noting that we STILL have price controls on crops left over from the last paradigm shift. I'm not optimistic about our ability to meet this one.

Steko 13y ago
The problem has nothing to do with preventing the market from pricing labor correctly. The problem is that the very nature of web services and scale creates huge lottery winners. The Instagram founders weren't 1,000 times better than other programmers. The market didn't price their labor there. They were at the right place at the right time and were a tiny bit better or more connected or whatever than their competitors. And because of that they effectively won a huge lottery. Everyone else was lucky if they got rent money.
- BrianEatWorld 13y ago
  The market did though. Ignore the raw values and consider the amounts taken into consideration by the economic actors, expected returns, which have a probability component. As the chance of payoff for startups is low, a high payoff may actually be required to accurately price the market to draw the requisite amount of labor.
  - clicks 13y ago
    Isn't that then a really good argument that relying on markets is decidedly not the way to go, and that socialism, for example, is more fair and just than capitalism? In the end, we all want a society that's "fair" to the largest amount of people, where each person gets about as much as they toil for. It seems the market is apparently doing a pretty lousy job, if we've come to a reality where two lucky dudes who were well connected could sell their photo-sharing app for a billion all the while a good half of the country risks getting financially decimated come an unforeseen disease or bad accident somewhere.
  - Steko 13y ago
    "Ignore the raw values" You can't ignore the raw values and just look at means, aggregates and weighted probability functions when the problem we're talking about is inequality. "chance of payoff for startups is low ..." What you're describing is entrepreneurial risk, not the price of labor.
    - 13y ago

chasb 13y ago

> All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career. Come work in healthcare.

akgerber 13y ago

Of course, the Instagram vs. Kodak comparison leaves out the actual network-connected cameras built into smartphones that Instagram leverages. Untold thousands of people are employed designing smartphone chips and the phones themselves, building smartphone operating systems and app platforms, manufacturing the smartphones, selling the phones and service, and maintaining the cellular network not to mention the rest of the internet, many also at middle class wages though not all in the US. Of course, in the heyday of film, many cameras were made in Japan or elsewhere. The few Instagram employees are just a small part of the puzzle that allows Instagram to be a successful company.

steveklabnik 13y ago

> I can't get this idea of tech destroying jobs out of my head. You may enjoy reading "Capital, vol 1"[1] by Karl Marx, specifically, chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry. Sections five and six discuss this in great detail. 1: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

YokoZar 13y ago

> All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career. It's entirely possible to create technology that works the other way, such as inventing the power-loom that replaced expensive hand-weavers with larger numbers of cheap migrant laborers, spawning the Luddite movement to smash the machines to protect "good jobs". There are surely lots of modern equivalents that replace the expensive few with larger numbers of cheap workers, simultaneously creating value and spreading wealth out. It could be something like software usability, or a process that lets locals produce something easily that they used to have to go to a central supplier for.